Portrait of Franz Joseph Haydn by Thomas Hardy, c. 1791.
In Tuesday’s (11/5) Guardian (U.K.), Phil Hebblethwaite writes, “In 1993 … the Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda was sent a photocopy of a manuscript purporting to be six lost Haydn keyboard sonatas…. Badura-Skoda was suspicious, but once he played the music, he became sure that the works were real. He asked his wife Eva, a musicologist, to examine the manuscript. Although the music wasn’t in Haydn’s hand, she believed it to be an authentic copyist’s score dating from around 1805 … They checked with the Haydn scholar, HC Robbins Landon, and he too was convinced…. Within hours, the Joseph Haydn Institute in Cologne declared the manuscript to be a fake. An expert from Sotheby’s in London agreed. The Badura-Skodas had been hoaxed, or so it seemed…. Musical hoaxes force us to question not just authenticity and ways of knowing, but also how we define words. In 2014, the supposedly deaf composer Mamoru Samuragochi stunned Japan when he confessed to using a ghostwriter for the 18 years in which he’d become famous for writing video-game scores and traditional classical music, including a symphony dedicated to the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima … He also wasn’t legally deaf…. A forger makes mincemeat of established narratives and gnaws at the rootstock of belief systems that shouldn’t be taken for granted.”
